A supermarket somewhere in Japan, late summer 2024. The rice aisle has a gap in it where the 5-kilogram bags used to be, and a handwritten sign taped to the shelf edge: お一人様1点限り — one bag per customer. The next delivery truck, when it comes, sells out within the hour.
Fast-forward to Sunday, 18 May 2025. A political fundraising event in Saga Prefecture, the kind of room where a sitting cabinet minister can relax a little. Farm minister Taku Eto, asked about the rice crisis gripping the country, tells the crowd he personally has never had to buy any — his supporters send him so much of it as gifts that he "could open a shop and sell it."
Someone in the room repeats it to a Kyodo News reporter. By Monday morning it is the lead story on every outlet in the country, next to photographs of the same empty shelves Eto was supposed to be fixing.
By the time Eto opened his mouth, the shortage already had a nickname: 令和の米騒動, the "Reiwa Rice Riot," after the current imperial era. The price told the story on its own. A standard 5-kilogram bag of rice that cost around ¥2,127 in May 2024 was selling for roughly ¥4,260 a year later — a 101.7% jump, the steepest year-on-year rise recorded in the decades Japan has tracked the figure. Rationing signs on half-stocked shelves went from rare to routine nationwide.
The shortage had no single cause. A brutal heatwave and drought across the 2023 growing season didn't wreck the harvest outright, but left an unusually high share of it chalky and broken, meaning mills had to process more raw rice for the same amount of sellable grain — a quality problem dressed up as a quantity shortfall. Demand had also quietly overtaken supply, helped by record inbound tourism, and by June 2024 national stockpiles were the lowest since comparable records began in 1999. Then, on 8 August 2024, a magnitude-7.1 quake off Hyuganada triggered Japan's first-ever Nankai Trough "megaquake advisory" — and households already nervous about supply spent the following week clearing rice off every shelf they could reach for emergency stockpiles.
That was the country Eto was supposed to be reassuring when he bragged about his own gift rice. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's already-fragile cabinet approval rating dropped to an all-time low of 27.4% within days. Eto apologized, insisted he does buy rice for his own table and that the gift rice was unmilled brown rice rather than the polished grain in the headlines, and resigned anyway on Wednesday, 21 May — three days after the quote first ran. "I made an extremely inappropriate remark at a time when citizens are suffering from soaring rice prices," he told reporters on his way out.
The name the crisis had already been given was no casual choice. Japan's original 米騒動, the Rice Riots of 1918, are still the largest, most violent popular uprising in the country's modern history: starting in the fishing town of Uozu and spreading to 38 cities, 153 towns and 177 villages, they drew over two million participants, led to roughly 25,000 arrests, and ended with Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake's entire cabinet resigning that September. Reaching for that name in 2024 for empty shelves and a tone-deaf gaffe was a deliberate, pointed comparison — not because the two events were remotely the same size, but because they shared the same fault line.
The postscript undercuts the drama a little. Eto's successor, Shinjiro Koizumi, sped up and cut the price of government reserve-rice auctions, and within about two years the country that had been rationing 5-kilogram bags was reportedly sitting on a rice surplus instead — no war or earthquake required to end it, just one minister with the authority to open the warehouse faster than the last one had.
Outside Japan, Eto's gaffe read as the whole scandal — a rich official embarrassing himself in front of people who couldn't afford what he was bragging about. The real story underneath it is less personal. Two million people rioted in 1918 because Japan's rice supply ran on almost no slack at all, and a century of mechanized farming, strategic reserves, and supermarket logistics didn't fix that so much as bury it under convenience. It took one hot summer, one earthquake advisory, and a few weeks of panic-buying to prove the slack was still exactly that thin. The only thing that had actually changed since 1918 was the release valve: in 1918 a government fell. In 2025, a government simply opened the stockpile and fired one minister instead.
- A standard 5-kilogram bag of rice cost about ¥2,127 in May 2024 and roughly ¥4,260 in May 2025 — a 101.7% year-on-year increase, the steepest rise Japan has recorded in its rice-price data.
- Japan's 2023 rice supply was estimated at 6.61 million tonnes against demand of about 7.05 million, and by June 2024 national stockpiles were the lowest since record-keeping began in 1999; an August 2024 magnitude-7.1 quake off Hyuganada then triggered the country's first-ever Nankai Trough "megaquake advisory," setting off a week of household rice stockpiling.
- Japan's original Rice Riots of 1918 began in Uozu, Toyama, and spread to 38 cities, 153 towns, and 177 villages, drawing over two million participants and roughly 25,000 arrests before Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake's cabinet resigned that September — the namesake the 2024–25 shortage was deliberately given, despite ending in one minister's resignation rather than a government's collapse.